10 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



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if unpaid, to seek the university, or to pay fees out of their 

 own pockets for the opportunities of seriously pursuing 

 any branch of learning or science within its walls. 



The inefficiency of the old universities is to a large 

 extent the cause of the neglect and ignorance of science 

 in the well-to-do class, who furnish the men who become 

 Government officials of all kinds and members of pro- 

 fessions which influence public opinion. But this in- 

 efficiency of the old universities is not due to their 

 devotion to literary studies and to abstract science, nor 

 to their objection to the pursuit of practical and commercial 

 studies. That excuse is sometimes put forward for them, 

 though at this moment they are, in fact, setting up labora- 

 tories and lecture-rooms for engineering, agriculture, 

 forestry, mining, and such applications of science. Nor 

 is it money which is really wanting at either Oxford or 

 Cambridge, although they are both begging for it from 

 the public. What Oxford and Cambridge want is not 

 money but men ; men as teachers " professors " is the 

 usual title given to them in a university who must be the 

 ablest, each in his own line, in the whole world. If such 

 professors existed in either Oxford or Cambridge, and 

 were allowed to teach, the town (if not the colleges!) 

 would be full to overflowing of students eager to pay 

 their fees and to spend, not three short terms of seven 

 weeks in each year, but the whole year, and many years, 

 in the laboratories and lecture-rooms of those commanding 

 men. 



To obtain such men to set the machinery at work 

 you must pay them handsomely, and give them authority 

 and the means of work. Once they were at work, the 

 mere fees of the students would furnish a splendid revenue. 

 There is plenty of money at Oxford and at Cambridge 

 a superabundance, in fact which could and should be 

 applied to this purpose, namely, that of securing and 



